Hollywood publicist Bumble Ward was once interviewed about her desire for action king Michael Bay to show his softer side: what she called the "gay Bay". The 300 movies are the nearest thing to the "gay Bay" genre. This is a sort of parallelquel to Zack Snyder's original 300, which was about the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC: this shows what happens around the same time when the Greek general Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton) is battling the Persian naval forces, commanded by the super-sexy Artemisia. She is played with a good deal of frowning, pouting and strutting by Eva Green, a performer who is becoming so eccentric she may be the Sarah Miles of her generation. Snyder co-writes with Kurt Johnstad; Noam Murro directs and again it is based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, called Xerxes. (Oddly, the character of Xerxes, played here and in the previous movie by Rodrigo Santoro, doesn't appear in the action much.)

It really is pretty dull, though, with the same moments of campy silliness: the same frowning gym bunnies with the same digitally enhanced abs. Murro has a very tiresome habit, whenever anyone gets stabbed or slashed, of switching suddenly to slo-mo so that the gout of blood can spray languidly across the screen. Lena Headey, playing the Spartan Queen Gorgo, has the film's best line, contemptuously responding to Themistokles's visit: "You've come a long way to stroke your cock, while you watch real men train." Some experiences are presumably worth the effort.